Since around 10am BST on Saturday 19 July 2014, the BBC’s iPlayer service started an extended outage, with fairly wide-ranging consequences. The Register covered it, as did BBC News.

From the app’s perspective, the BBC servers have been either returning Not Found, returning a “no media” error code, or returning a page intended for humans telling them that the service is unavailable. Unfortunately, the last of these does not parse correctly, and Listen Again shows a parse error: Reference to undeclared entity ‘hellip’.

These are all symptoms of the ongoing BBC outage, and should clear once the BBC resume their normal service.

Around Friday 2 May, the BBC changed the format of the “media selector” their web servers return, which Listen Again uses to decide how to stream the audio (for both UK and International streams). The immediate result of this was that Listen Again version 1.5 and earlier cannot understand which streams it can use, and so you will see the dreaded “error getting stream descriptions” error message.

I’ve released version 1.6 of Listen Again which should understand both the new and old formats. I’ve only tested it in the UK, but it may work for international streams too. Look out for the update coming in the next 5 working days.

Version 1.5 adds a few new stations (BBC World Service, and BBC Solent). Let me know how you get on with them.

It also adds better handling of HTTP protocol errors. Recently the BBC’s media server has started returning 500 Unavailable errors, but they malform the error response which causes the phone’s header parser some problems. This release catches this error case and now displays an error message rather than crashing.

Also, some programmes have very long titles, for example:
“Book of the Week: Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal: Episode 2”

This is so long it falls off the right-hand side of the screen, so you can’t read the episode number. This release takes the episode number and presents it as part of the programme’s description.

You can listen to almost all programmes from the previous week. This includes programmes which are not available as podcasts. You can browse programmes by the day they were broadcast on, or you can browse episodes by series.